going from the reddit star wars fandom to the tumblr star wars fandom is giving me insane whiplash. the upside is that people aren’t bitching about every single imperfect detail in the entire franchise, but the downside is that i’ve seen more fanart of obi wan and commander cody tenderly knowing each other than i have ever wanted to in my life in the last three hours and it has probably fundamentally altered the way i interact with the entire franchise

after the initial shock of being plunged into the icy cold lake of seeing my childhood action figures caressing each others sweaty chests in a gentle, hidden moment after a battle, i’ve been able to get my wits about me and realize that yeah, i’m kinda with it

Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you're reading that you get chills???

So I thought to myself

Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan

And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat

And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China

And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.

The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:

KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.

In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!

THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH

and in turn

HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS

*AND*

in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu

"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."

Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.

WHAT

YALL

This means

That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans

The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn't a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It's us.

Yeah it's a usable resource, edible fucking food, that America just lets smother whole areas or try to destroy by flooding the ecosystem with poison 🥲🥲🥲

it’s so funny to me that these are one episode apart

[x]

Get hot water, not boiling hot but almost hotter than you can stand, and put a metal spoon in it for a few seconds. Take the spoon and put it against the mosquito bite for about 30 seconds. Do it a few times if you like. The proteins that cause the itching are susceptible to heat and break down.

WHY DON’T THEY TEACH THIS SHIT I have four decades of suffering from skeeter bites behind me

One study on 146 individuals treated with a Bite-Away heat pen found similarly effective results from heat treatment; thankfully, spoons dunked in water cost way less than the Bite-Away’s 30 bucks.

You can also blast the bite with a hair dryer - learned this from my mom and it works great

I know I put this on the tags of that "horses will eat meat and eggs" post but like if that's all it takes for people to get freaked out and think horses are deranged then they should also be aware that almost all other herbivores do the exact same thing. It's actually seems to be way less common for herbivores to eat 100% only plants than it is for them to eat meat occasionally (koalas are one of the suspected few strict herbivores bc their diet and digestive system is so specialized). They don't go out searching/hunting for it like carnivores and omnivores, but if they stumble across some carrion or some eggs (or some particularly easy live meat), that's fair game, even moreso if other food is scarce.

Like,,,,Deer will eat dead fish and rabbits, and have been recorded eating dead deer also. They've also been recorded eating live hatchlings from bird nests. Rabbits will scavenge birds a lot, and also do scavenging cannibalism. Snowshoe hares have been recorded scavenging a lynx, which is ironically their main predator when alive. Elephants will eat fish. Cows will eat live birds just right of the ground, along with eggs they may find.

Horses aren't deranged bc they'll eat meat, they're deranged bc theyre like if you put the ghost of a psychically-sensitive victorian child into the body of a 1500 pound mammal.

1948 Buick Streamliner by Norman Timbs..

norman timbs licked this poor car half to death

speaking of words. this entry (oxford latin dictionary) reads almost like a poem or something to me

Another wizard has been found torn asunder in Elf Pussy Forest

What was he doing in the Elf Pussy Forest?

Fracking

Teachers have tried this and are amazed when their classes don’t go feral like in the book.  It’s almost as if the book was supposed to be satire and not a treaty on the nature of humanity.

there’s a timeskip

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

after losing control of the signal fire there’s a FUCKING TIMESKIP and when the next chapter starts everyone’s hair is several inches longer and their clothes have rotted to shreds and they’re still just kind of chilling!!!!

IT TAKES THE TERRIBLE IMPERIALISM MIND-POISONED EXCESSIVELY BRITISH BOYS IN THE ACTUAL BOOK SEVERAL MONTHS TO COMMIT A SINGLE ACT OF INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE, EVEN THE ONE (1) CHILD WRITTEN AS AN ACTUAL SOCIOPATH

AND then when they DO turn on each other it is because

THERE’S AN UNSPECIFIED WORLD WAR HAPPENING

AND A PILOT’S CORPSE CRASH LANDS ON THE ISLAND POST-DOGFIGHT AND THE CHILDREN MISTAKE THE PARACHUTE FOR A MONSTER AND SPIRAL INTO PARANOIA

BECAUSE CHILDREN INHERIT THE LEGACY AND TRAUMA OF VIOLENCE FROM THE ADULTS WAGING WAR AROUND THEM

HURR DURR IN THE REAL WORLD IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN LIKE IN LORD OF THE FLIES -

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN THAT WAY IN LORD OF THE FLIES EITHER YOU JUST HAVEN’T READ IT SINCE HIGH SCHOOL IF EVER AND DON’T REMEMBER WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN THE GODDAMN BOOK

It is truly unbelievable to me how many people miss the brutal irony of Lord of the Flies: they are on the plane in the first place because they’re being evacuated because of World War II. At the end, they are rescued by a military battle cruiser. And the point - the entire, bitter, devastating point of the entire novel - lies in the reaction of the British officer who rescues them.

LITERALLY COULD THIS BE ANY CLEARER. The cheerfully ignorant hypocrisy of the officer, the idea that of course it’s adorable for little boys to play at war and then the abrupt horror of understanding that it wasn’t a game at all; the fumbling, cruelly hilarious implication that of course BRITISH boys couldn’t possibly engage in violence because what horrible violent shit did the British Empire ever do lol; and finally the uneasy, unspoken, half-acknowledged comparison the officer makes between himself and these boys, the truth he can’t quite voice, that these boys are simply a microcosm of the war-torn world of adults that he belongs to.

IT FUCKING RULES OK and it is not, not, NOT just “a book about how kids/people are bad actually.” It’s about how a culture of war perpetuates war, it shines a light on the horrors of war in general by showing the petty, stupid, useless waste of it all in miniature.

Plants what now

okay so apparently we just discovered that plants emit clicking sounds too high pitched for us to hear, and are noisy when they're stressed but quiet when content

There needs to be more research done into this, and as of now we can't say why the sounds happen but. WHAT.

I knew they could hear noises but apparently they MAKE noises too

Seeing fan art of a white boy with dark hair in a suit on your dash and trying to guess which one it is

Is Fox Mulder the most comically-brutalized protagonist in television history? Not only is he shot and beaten up on a regular basis, but the list of extreme and exotic injuries he accrues over the course of the series has got to be some kind of TV cop record. The man is mind-wiped by the military in only the second episode. For any other TV cop, that would be a career-defining event, but it’s just a day in the life of Agent Spooky.

Bro was cocooned by carnivorous insects, thrown out of a nuclear submarine into the Alaskan tundra by an alien bounty hunter, beaten up by an invisible gorilla. He was experimented on in a Siberian gulag, drowned in the Bermuda Triangle, tortured by Neo-Nazis. I wonder what getting Freaky Friday-ed by a malfunctioning UFO cloaking device does to your gonads. How much radiation has he been exposed to? Someone test this man’s hair follicles. How many mysterious bodily fluids has he dipped his finger in and tasted at crime scenes? Dear God, someone test him for HIV. Imagine being the FBI doctor who administers his physicals.

Remember when the Shadow Government was putting LSD in Mulder’s water tank? Our boy got blown up in an underground train car and resurrected in a Navajo healing ceremony, and that’s not even the last train car he would get blown up in. One time, his lungs were filled with mutated tobacco beetles. Hoss let a quack doctor give him ketamine and drill a hole in his goddamn skull. In an unrelated incident, he had a chunk of his brain stolen. He was locked in a padded cell, trapped inside of a video game, and— of course —abducted by aliens. Fox Mulder was fully dead, and then came back to life after being exhumed, and nobody even seemed that surprised when he rolled up at the J. Edgar Hoover building like nothing had happened.

Am I missing anything? How is this man still alive? His body must be like a pillowcase full of broken lightbulbs. Every time he moves, you just hear crunching.

Not to be outdone, Dana Scully was also abducted by aliens, cocooned by carnivorous insects, and kidnapped and tortured by multiple serial killers. Remember when they were both digested by a giant psychedelic mushroom? Remember when they got lost at sea on a Norwegian naval vessel that made them rapidly age like the beach from that M. Night Shyamalan movie? Name another TV cop duo who could bounce right back from that.

Our good Catholic queen was almost eaten by cannibals, had her heart nearly ripped out by a fictional character conjured to life by an edgelord novelist who moved in next door to her partner to stalk her. She was forcibly sterilized by the Shadow Government, given sci-fi brain cancer, and then impregnated with an alien bullshit baby. One time a cult strapped her to the Sloth bed from Se7en so a brain-eating slug monster could burrow into her spine.

If you got ergot poisoning from a tattoo and your one night stand tried to throw you in the apartment building murder furnace from Single White Female, it would be the single most traumatic day of your life. For Dana Scully, it wasn’t even her last 90’s sex thriller basement murder furnace. You try getting shot in the gut and evading the Grim Reaper while holding hands with a suicidal old man death-psychic and see what happens. That wasn’t even her first suicidal old man death-psychic.

A lot people focus on how psychologically messed up Mulder and Scully are, but the level of physical punishment these characters endure is so off the charts it’s hilarious. What’s-his-nuts and the other Deschanel from Bones could never.

butch fatale

She walked into my office with the swagger of a racecar pit crew boss. From her steel toed boots to her safety glasses, this dame was giving me forklift certified vibes strong enough to shake me loose from my classic depression laced with alcoholism.

Misogyny is not an inherent biological feature in men. It’s a societal ill that men are taught and socially rewarded for perpetuating. Spreading the idea that misogyny is biological is a really defeatist way of looking at things because leads to people thinking that women being harassed and attacked and murdered is just the natural order of things and not something that we can push back against and change and eradicate. 

Writer and RiteGud co-host Raquel S Benedict criticizing sanitized portrayals of queerness in media.

‘Episode 1 is like, we’re flung together and I resent him. I mean, it’s a classic rom-com set up, actually.’ ~ Hugh Dancy

Did anyone else know this?